Yamaha Pro Music Product Guide

Everything a musician could ask for …

Yamaha Music is a manufacturer of musical instruments like guitars, basses, drums, synthesizers, but also speakers, mixers, PA systems, … Materials for professional and amateur musicians all over the world. They have quite a big catalog and this year they took the decision to also move it to mobile.

They decided to work with their trusted advertising agency Büro 76 in Hamburg (Germany) with whom they have been cooperating for over 10 years on a diversity of projects in the field of advertising, trade fairs, photography and video.
The product catalog is a 300 pages document printed annually in a variety of languages and currencies and over the years it became indispensable for both consumers and resellers.

This year they launched the app for the German market and introduced it at a trade show in the US. Yamaha Music first wants to evaluate the market reception and then introduce it step by step per country in different languages.

From product catalog to sales enablement app

For the consumer the app has the advantage of being more interactive, offering views of different models of guitars by colour, offering 360° views, sound samples and detailed pictures. It is of course easier to handle than a print catalogue and makes it also easier to look to other items than the one you were originally looking for.
In addition to the public content, the app also offers content only accessible to representatives and resellers.
They need to login to get access to their content and depending on their profile they get the price list they are entitled to use. Via a web viewer they have access to an external calculation and ordering module which makes it very easy for them to make price offers for their customers. For them it’s a very effective sales tool enabling them to show all available models and to make instant price offers.

How to make a difference

Büro 76 created the catalog in InDesign. They made the choice for Twixl Publisher because of the ability to publish per article and to update the app instantly if needed. It required some initial investment to create and enrich the contents but the product portfolio only evolves slowly so there is no need to update the complete catalog every year. Making it more a one-time investment followed by a lower maintenance cost.
Once the content has been created for one language it is easy to duplicate to another language and it has the advantage that you don’t have one big deadline anymore. It has evolved to a work in progress were any new product or update is immediately available in the app.

The app is a nice to have for customers but the most important target group are the resellers. Yamaha Music and Büro 76 needed to find a reason for them to use the app instead of the online services which were already available to them.
Offering an app that they can use while they are talking to the customer, and that lets them show all product details immediately in a user-friendly way was one aspect, but also being able to make instant quotes within the same app adds just that extra that made the app successful.

Step by step

Büro 76 decided to create the app for tablets only because it is first and foremost a sales enablement tool and you need a minimum screen size to be able to show the products in a proper way.

This project was never developed with the ambition to stop publishing the print catalog. It is about developing a sales enablement tool. It reuses the content of the print catalog and it adds the price lists and the ability to provide quotes.

Yamaha Music developed this app in the first place for the big German market but with the ambition to deploy it in more countries. This is why it was developed in English so it would be easier to sell the concept to other countries. Now comes the time to regain this investment by selling the project to other countries with the only extra cost being the translation, and perhaps some extra budget to develop features specifically for the needs of the individual countries.

We at Twixl love it! It's really a showcase for article-based publishing with InDesign-based content.

Type of application

Article -Based

Publisher

Yamaha Music Europe GmbH

Characteristics

Sales enablement app with public content and restricted access content